Angela's Business Part 44

She omitted her inquiry about Charles's writing altogether (thus denying him his chance to mention the recent rather gratifying acceptance of Dionysius, no less), and the flattering things she kept saying of Angela had, to his ear, a faintly tentative ring, requiring his confirmation.

But his first vague wonder, whether anything could have happened, was soon lost in other reactions. Thus, he had to wince a little in agreeing, once more, that Donald's future wife was a thoroughly "womanly girl." Few authorities enjoy denying the ripe sum of their own best thinking. But a later remark of Mrs. Wing's took a much deeper twist in his mind.

"Really," she said, slowly and dubiously, following a pause, "I have but one fault to find with Donald's choice, and that is--well, frankly, Angela seemed to care so little for Paulie and Neddy Warder.... And Donald was such a goose over them, dear boy."

As he did not see his way clear to replying to that, "I hope you're mistaken, ma'am," Charles merely smiled vaguely, and said nothing. But what he thought, on the delicate implication, was nothing about Angela at all--only that Donald had been rather less of a goose over Paulie and Neddy than Mary Wing had been....

Then the sitting-room clock ticked for a s.p.a.ce, while Mrs. Wing communed with herself. And Charles, gazing out into the park, waiting for his friend, thought how it was that a young woman's work--even an extraordinary young woman like Mary--always subtly lacked just that ultimate touch of grim seriousness which justified the "fierce hackings away" of a man. For, as an abstract truth, there was positively no such thing as a Permanent Spinster: and women who were not spinsters, and normally desired Paulies and Neddies of their own, could not possibly fulfill their longings without serious complications to themselves, then and thenceforward. It was no human or escapable "tyranny" that had made Woman, to this degree, to her glory or her disaster, forever the victim of her s.e.x: and, by the same token, fixed the final responsibility for the economic support of the family upon the shoulders of the predestined and uncompromised provider, Man....

Yes, then and thenceforward ... Could you, for example, imagine Mary Wing--who had had chances to marry before now, who might reasonably marry at any time--could you picture Mary packing off her three little darlings to a creche every morning, that she might go and grow her soul at a desk somewhere? Maybe so; but he wondered....

He was thinking whether he could contrive to discuss the creche and endowment arguments in his novel--for of course you could make a story carry just a certain amount of "solid stuff," and only dreary prigs of readers would lie still while you tried to feed them forcibly with a spoon--when all at once Mrs. Wing, near by, was heard to strike her hands together, with a little e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n.

"Oh, Mr. Garrott! I do believe Mary's at the High School all the time!"

That made the thoughtful visitor turn swiftly enough.

"At the _High School_?"

"It's so stupid of me!" she explained, with some relief, it seemed.

"I've just remembered. You know, she never cleared her papers and things out of her office closet there, and it got on her mind when she was sick. And to-day, when she came in from school, she told me she had arranged with Mr. Geddie over the telephone--the man who has her office now--to go and attend to it this afternoon. Yes, that's it--I'm sure!"

"Oh!" said Charles, not a little perplexed. "And then, you mean--she decided to go to the Flowers' instead?"

"Well, to go there first--I suppose. Donald came in just as she finished lunch--to talk with her about something. Then, when he had gone, Mary told me she was going down to see Angela. It was all rather unexpected--and somehow the High School went out of my mind completely."

"But I hope nothing's happened?" he said quickly.

"Well--I don't know that there has."

Perplexity pa.s.sed at once into the certainty that something had happened. The instant thought in the young man's mind was: What's Angela done now? Having risen, he gazed with direct inquiry at his elderly friend. But her eyes glanced away from him; and she put him off further by repeating: "It was stupid of me to keep you."

Mrs. Wing added that Mary was certainly at the High School now. Charles, turning disturbed away, remarked that perhaps he would still be in time to help with the office cleaning, and she said that was very kind of him.

"She'll be glad to see you, I know. Indeed, she has appreciated all you've done for her--those beautiful articles, for example--more than you quite realize, perhaps."

But the young man shook his head, and said with a kind of bitterness: "I've never done anything for her in my life."

And then, as he took the lady's hand to say good-bye, he asked abruptly: "But why shouldn't I know what's happened, Mrs. Wing?"

"Oh," said Mary's mother, and hesitated.

"Yes, why shouldn't you?" said she, and hesitated again.

"Well," she began again slowly, "it's nothing so serious, as I said,--just a fresh disappointment for Mary,--that is really all it amounts to with me. Very likely Donald has intimated to you that he was not going to Wyoming?"

The caller stared at her dumbfounded.

"Not going to Wyoming! Why!--why not?"

"Well, he feels, in his new circ.u.mstances," said Mrs. Wing, uneasily, "that it would be more suitable to accept the position in New York.

But--I really had little opportunity to discuss it with Mary. She seemed--to be frank--much disturbed, she had so set her heart on this work in the West--"

"More _suitable_!... How?"

"Well, for one thing--it doesn't seem fair to separate Angela so far from her mother, as would have to be the case in Wyoming."

But into Charles's mind there had suddenly popped back a stray remark let fall by Donald, in the only talk he had had with him for weeks: "I tell you, Charlie, it's pretty rough on a girl to be dragged off to live in a shack nine miles from nowhere!" A mere pa.s.sing observation, that he had paid no attention to at the time--but was that it? Was that the reason why another of Mary Wing's most cherished plans must suddenly cave in?

He stood utterly dismayed.

"So Mrs. Flower," he asked, with some want of composure, "is going to live with them in New York?"

"Oh, no,--not for the present, I believe. She feels, and so do I, that young couples should be left to themselves to make their start. But they will be so near that they can visit back and forth--which would be impossible if Donald--"

"But Mrs. Flower can't live here by herself?"

"Well, no," said Mrs. Wing, and fussed with books on the table. "That has been the great problem, of course. Dr. Flower's death has complicated the situation sadly. I believe the present plan is for Wallace--the boy, you know--to come back and live with her--just for the next few months, while Donald and Angela are finding themselves."

Charles stood without a word. But perhaps his look betrayed what he felt, for Mrs. Wing threw out her hands with a helpless gesture, and cried: "Well, he is the man of the family now!"

"However," she added, turning away, "perhaps Mary will be able to hit upon some other arrangement. That is what she went there for--to talk the whole situation over with Angela."

But Charles, who had always thought of Angela as "soft" and Mary as "hard," seemed somehow quite certain that that talk had accomplished nothing. With brief speech, he moved toward the door. Doubtless struck with the fixed gravity of his look, Mary's mother, who had been an old-fas.h.i.+oned girl herself once, said with an effort, and yet firmly too:--

"It is life itself that is hard. Marriage means--readjustment. That is the only comment to make."

It was precisely the point on which the silent young man did not agree with her. To him, as to her, all the sharp force of this tidings was, indeed, in Mary's new overthrow. And yet for the moment there seemed to be room in him for nothing else but comments on the vast void in Mary's so different cousin.

Angela was wanting in the responsible qualities of a full-grown human being. Her fatal lack was in human worth. It was the sum of all he had thought about her since the day he had called upon her poor father. It was the cap and climax of all he meant to say about her in his New Novel.

So Charles took his leave with an abstracted face.

In the drawer of the Studio table, there was growing now, night by night, a fresh stack of ma.n.u.script, steady and firm upon a new Line.

Mary Wing had straightened out this Line for Charles: Mary who had taught him once and for all that a woman could be finely independent, and still uphold the interdependence which held the world together. Yet Mary, the admirable, was after all but his "contrast" and his foil: it was for the peculiarities of her opposite that he had finally whetted his pencil. And, in the intense and retrospective thinking which went along with the best writing he had ever yet done, the young man considered that he had got to the bottom of Angela's case, and her sisters', quite thoroughly explored the souls of the Waiting Women of Romance.

But this news of her, these final touches as to the Nice Girl's brother and her future husband, seemed to fling at him, as it were, a last conclusive chapter for his "Notes on Women." That marriage meant readjustments he, the authority, doubtless understood as well as another. That this marriage might make it necessary for Wallie Flower to be readjusted out of his education: even that was allowed as conceivable. But that the very first act of Angela's new life should be to influence her husband in the direction of his weakness, and, as it seemed, of her own good comfort--what was this, indeed, but a brilliant certification of all the grounds of his own attack?...

The author's face, the author's swift feet, were set toward the High School. His errand--now--was to cheer up Mary Wing. "Make her look on the bright side": so her mother had urged at parting. That necessity remained as a soreness and dull anger through all the young man's consciousness. And yet, in nearly a mile's walk, he hardly thought of Mary once.

He was surveying, as if from a new peak, the unhappy situation of Home-Makers with their Homes yet to seek: the considerable army of the involuntary spinsters of leisure. And more than ever now, perhaps, he saw these sisters as a Type, pathetically marked: the innocent creatures, the helpless victims, of a dying ideal of themselves.

Here was poor little Angela, his Novel's case in point. She was born a human being, she was born a being with s.e.x. And in twenty-six years'

contact with the rich and human world, she had gathered nothing to her sum beyond what tended to enhance her s.e.x's attraction. So selecting, she had permanently lost the fullness of her double birthright: all in nice, unconscious and inevitable response to an environment which continually a.s.sured her that being a woman was enough.

If life had been real and bright and turbulent around her, and she sat within and polished her pink nails, it was because she was a woman. If she was given no education beyond the demands of provincial parlor-talk, no training for her hands, no occupation for her head, if no one ever thought of her as a full-statured being who must pay her way in substantial coin; this, again, was because she was a woman, and a woman (if any one bothered with argument at all) some day might--or might not--be the mother of children. Surely it had not been Angela's fault if she was early apprised, though through a sweet mist, that she had but one faculty of any value in the world's market; not her fault if, amid general approval, she innocently spent her youth and idleness in tricking out her value, and bringing it steadily to the attention of the only beings who could have a use for it. Least of all was it her fault if her peculiar business, and her odd specialized training, were bounded, not by marriage, but only by a wedding-day. For the final unnaturalness, the crowning wrong in her situation was exactly this: that, being told that she must be a wife or nothing, she was coincidently told that being a wife was a matter which a nice girl did well to know nothing about....

The author, sharpening his phrases, walked in angry abstraction. He pa.s.sed old acquaintances as if he had never seen them before....

Oh, it was true (he conceded), a thousand times true, that many women of this crude bringing-up did develop, when their time came, a splendid competence over all their special field. But it was a little too much to a.s.sume that every creature in the female form could be counted on to perform such a feat of pure character. And Romance, which gallantly or indifferently made these exact a.s.sumptions, defending and cheris.h.i.+ng the queer but comfortable orientalization with the cloak of false "womanliness," scarcely pretended to believe its own agreeable fictions.